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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

How to organize a Constitution Unit

I wrote an earlier post in honor of Constitution Day on how to create a better assessment for the Constitution. So today I will start a series of posts on how to teach the Constitution in ways that help students read and understand how it works rather than memorizing a bunch of facts about it.So instead of going Article by Article, or marching through the three branches of government, I would suggest going principle by principle. In other words, start with the Big Ideas or the Essential Questions about the Constitution. See the chart below:

And now check out the chart below to see what students would learn about each principle/essential question and where they can read about it in the text itself. It helps illustrate, I hope, how to teach the Constitution so students understand what it means.

My next posts will give further details with lesson ideas and problems for students to solve for some of the topics below. But in the meantime, do check out the tab at the top for links to Constitution websites.

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About Me

I have recently returned to the classroom, teaching middle school U.S. history in west suburban Chicago, after 8 years of teaching and evaluating social studies pre-service teachers at Northern Illinois University. Previously, I taught high school U.S. history and sociology, as well as 7th grade geography. I have a master’s degree in U.S. history and a minor obsession with the Roosevelts. I also write for the "Future of History" blog on Middleweb.com.